the following TRB committees: Committee on Safety Data, Analysis, and Evaluation (ANB20) and Pedestrian Committee (ANF10).

Prospective Students: I am always looking for graduate students who are interested in research in transportation and computing (see my research interests: being able to prototype software to test your ideas, automate data processing and enable reproducibility is mandatory). Due to large volume of sollicitation by email, make sure to make a well articulated case for yourself and provide relevant information, or you will be ignored. Although all teaching is done in French at Polytechnique Montréal, you may write your thesis in English.

I am interested in really intelligent transportation systems, i.e. systems that actually exhibit intelligent features such as adaptation to changing conditions with minimal supervising. Massive amounts of data are now collected continuously in our connected world, from geo-location devices in mobile phones to video sensors. If this data can be automatically analyzed, there are great opportunities for a better understanding and optimization of transportation systems, from their management to user information. The field of computational transportation science is thus emerging at the intersection of computer/data science and transportation, to apply advanced data processing techniques to transportation.

I am particularly interested in collecting and analyzing microscopic user data, e.g. trajectory data collected automatically using video sensors and computer vision techniques. This data can be interpreted automatically to learn and understand road users' behaviour and analyze road safety (without waiting for accidents to happen). I am also very interested in mobility in general, in particular vulnerable road users, cyclists and pedestrians (or active modes of transportation). Research on them has been typically limited, in particular in regard of their importance. The following is a list of keywords that are relevant to my research interests:

Finally, I am a supporter of open science for many reasons, both from a philosophical and moral point of view, and from a practical point of view. From a philosophical and moral point of view, it is the right thing to do, especially for publicly funded research institutions and it allows reproducible research: why should you trust my claims if you cannot replicate my work? From a practical point of view, it is a better method (open source software is a better software development technique) and my research benefits from collaboration and sharing code and data with you, as you reference my research and release publicly your improvements in turn). Join the movement!

As stated in my research interests I support open science, i.e. sharing data and code. The most important project I started is a code repository called Traffic Intelligence, containing various tools for transportation data processing, in particular an implementation of a feature-based tracking algorithm similar to our CRV paper of 2006.

Open source code

Traffic Intelligence (Bitbucket repository with tutorials and guides): tools for transportation analysis, in particular road traffic, including a video analysis tool that extract the trajectories of moving objects from video data

Urban Tracker: alternate tracker based on background subtraction and keypoints, less sensitive to differences in road user sizes (eg vehicles and pedestrians)

I mentored Piotr Bilinski (INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis) to work on the Google Summer of Code project on the implementation of IO trajectory tools (sqlite database and trajectory distances)

I mentored Dat Chu to work on the Google Summer of Code project on the implementation of a feature tracker

An example of the use of KLT and OpenCV together. Even if OpenCV has some feature-tracking functions, the KLT implementation is simple to use and efficient. However, its file reading capabilities are limited to pgm image files, while OpenCV can read avi file. Here is the example with the corresponding Makefile modified from KLT (tested under Cygwin on Windows XP). This piece of code is released under the GNU General Public License (February 2006).

Shared source code

tvaLib: integrated tool and library for surrogate safety analysis developed by Paul St-Aubin and based on his Ph.D. thesis (link to come) built on top of Traffic Intelligence (see overview in P. St-Aubin, N. Saunier, and L. F. Miranda-Moreno. Large-Scale Automated Proactive Road Safety Analysis using Video Data. Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, 58, Part B:363-379, 2015)

Data

Data used for the 2016 TRB paper "Calibration of driving behavior models using derivative-free optimization and video data for montreal highways" on the [page with data]

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M. Gomaa Mohamed and N. Saunier. An investigation of different geometric representations of road user volume and their impact on post-encroachment time. Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, 2659:55–62, 2017. Presented at the 2017 Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting [TRR]

A. Lessard, F. Bélisle, G.-A. Bilodeau, and N. Saunier. The CountingApp, or How to Count Vehicles in 500 Hours of Video. In International Workshop on Automatic Traffic Surveillance, Las Vegas, July 2016. IEEE [pdf]

L. Miranda-Moreno, N. Saunier, S. Zangenehpour, and T. Nosal. Analysis of the impact of the côte-ste-catherine bidirectional bicycle track on the safety of cyclists and pedestrians. Technical report, City of Montréal, 2015

S. Zangenehpour, L. Miranda-Moreno and N. Saunier. Automated Classification Based on Video Data at Intersections with Heavy Pedestrian and Bicycle Traffic: Methodology and Application. In Canadian Multidisciplinary Road Safety Conference, Vancouver, British Columbia, June 2014 Second prize of the Student Paper Competition

P. Anderson-Trocme, L. Miranda-Moreno, and N. Saunier. Microsimulation calibration using trajectories based on image processing: from data collection to emission modeling. In Canadian Society for Civil Engineering Annual Conference, 2014

N. Saunier. Roundabout safety in quebec. In The Safety Network - The Official Newsletter of the Canadian Association of Road Safety Professionals. Canadian Association of Road Safety Professionals, 2013

M. Brosseau, S. Zangenehpour, N. Saunier, and L. Miranda-Moreno. The impact of waiting time and other factors on dangerous pedestrian crossings and violations at signalized intersections: a case study in montreal. Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour, 21:159-172, 2013 [pdf] [TR-F]

N. Saunier and S. Midenet. Creating ensemble classifiers through order and incremental data selection in a stream. Pattern Analysis & Applications, 2012. [pdf] The final publication is available at www.springerlink.com

N. Saunier and S. Midenet. Automatic Estimation of the Exposure to Lateral Collision in Signalized Intersections using Video Sensors. [arXiv:1012.4776]

N. Saunier, J.-M. Auberlet and M.-A. Granié. A study of pedestrian crossing behaviour using video sensors. Poster at the 23rd International Cooperation on Theories and Concepts in Traffic safety (ICTCT), The Hague, November 2010 [pdf]

How Many Ways to Crash, Invited Presentation in the Session on Developments in Alternative Models for Road Safety, Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C., January 13th, 2010 [pdf]

Presentations on Road Safety Analysis (with Kareem El-Basyouny and Karim Ismail) and Video-based Transportation Data Collection (with Karim Ismail) at a joint Transportation Symposium of the University of British Columbia and University of Washington, Seattle, April 3rd 2009

Automatic detection of vehicle interactions in a signalized intersection, 16th Workshop of the International Cooperation on Theories and Concepts in Traffic safety, Soesterberg, October 30th, 2003 [pdf]

Research funding has been obtained from various sources, in particular the Québec Ministry of Transportation (currently Ministry of Transportation, Sustainable Mobility, and Transportation Electrification (MTMDET), formerly MTQ), the Québec for Research on Nature and Technology (FRQNT), Québec Fund for Health Research (FRQS) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC)

Co-applicant (PI Guillaume-Alexandre Bilodeau +1 researcher), Development of a system for the detection and tracking of road users for the adaptative traffic control, FRQNT Team Grant, 143760$, 2015-2018